Bad Smells

"Finally, I confessed all my sins to you
and stopped trying to hide my guilt. 
I said to myself, 'I will confess my rebellion to the 
Lord.'
And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone."
--Psalm 32:5 

Have you ever had trouble holding in good news? When good things happen, it can be difficult to bottle in big news that you really want to share.

But the opposite effect takes place when we feel shame. Shame leads us to secrecy. The author of Psalm 32 is looking back, writing about a time in his past when he was holding something in that he really needed to share with God.

When I was in college, I worked as a hall supervisor in the guys’ freshman dorm. Each fall, after being away for the summer, I would move back into the dorm a few days before all the freshman guys arrived.

Every year when I opened the door the hall for the first time, I remembered how terrible the smell is in a guys’ freshman dorm. It smelled like I was on the inside of a warm, sweaty sock.  

However, about a month into each school year, I would stop noticing the smell. Living there long enough made the dorm smell normal to me.

Scientists say that part of the job of our noses is to bring new smells to our attention—it’s a safety mechanism. If we stay in a place that smells bad long enough, we stop noticing the offensive odor. So in the dorm, I didn't notice the smell after a while. The smell didn’t actually go away. I just couldn’t smell it anymore.

It’s the same way with our sin. 

Richard Rohr defines sins as “fixations that prevent the energy of life, God’s love from flowing freely. They are self-erected blockades that cut us off from God and hence from our own authentic potential.”

At first, when we’re involved in a behavior we know is wrong, the stench of that sin bothers us. It's alarming and that’s a healthy function of our psyche. Our conscience taps on our skull because we know we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing.

But when we live in the routine of repeating a sinful behavior again and again, that behavior starts to seem normal to us. We don’t think of it as sin.

It’s when we take a step back and see the big picture that we realize how much our habits were hurting us. 

If growing close to Jesus makes you uncomfortable about the way you act, that can be a good thing. 

You're noticing the stench again. We can't surrender sin that we don't acknowledge as sin.